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    <p class="site_pos">You are here:  <a href="../index.html">Home</a> -&gt; <a href="help.html">Help</a> -&gt; RSS Help</p>
    <h1><a name="top">RSS Feeds Help</a></h1>
    <h2>Summary</h2>
    <ol id="summary">
		<li><a href="#arg_intro">Introduction - A little history...</a>
			<ol>
				<li><a href="#arg_before">Before XML</a></li>
				<li><a href="#arg_active">Active Channels</a></li>
				<li><a href="#arg_birth">The birth</a></li>
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		<li><a href="#arg_RSS">RSS</a>
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				<li><a href="#arg_what_are">What are RSS feeds?</a></li>
				<li><a href="#arg_how_do">How do RSS feeds work?</a></li>
				<li><a href="#arg_where_to_find">Where can I find them?</a></li>
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	    <li><h2><a name="arg_intro">Introduction - A little history...</a></h2>
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			    <li><h3><a name="arg_before">Before XML</a></h3>
					<p>The introduction of <span class="gloss" title="eXtensible Markup Language">XML</span> brought a new era in sharing information. Previously, this exchange was hard. Companies often had different and proprietary transmission protocols and data formats, for the most part not publicly available. The idea of transmitting information using something different from <span class="gloss" title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</span> was absurd. This situation changed in 1998 when Microsoft introduced Internet Exporer 4, with a new feature called Active Channels.</p><p class="top_link"><a href="#top">Top</a></p>
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			    <li><h3><a name="arg_active">Active Channels</a></h3>
					<p>Built upon Channel Definition Format (CDF), developed by Microsoft, Active Channels allowed the content of a website to be sent directly to user's desktop bundled with Active Desktop. The big issue of Active Channel was it's poor  suppport for the everyday user: anyone could create a channel but the industry never gave an easy-to-use tool to treat CDF files. The companies which used this new technology in first place overwhelmed users with tons of advertisments that raised the bandwidth needed for the channel. Moreover, people never really understood the power and the value of Active Channels. The <em>syndacation</em>(transmission and sharing of information) concept seemed to die with the failure of CDF, that received the raccomendation of the W3C. And then came RSS... </p><p class="top_link"><a href="#top">Top</a></p>
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			    <li><h3><a name="arg_birth">The birth</a></h3>
					<p>In March 1999, Netscape launched the My Netscape portal, a single place for users to visit for all their news. The idea was simple: to pull information from any number of news sources and display them on My Netscape. To facilitate this idea, Dan Libby of Netscape Communications developed RDF Site Summary (RSS), an XML data format based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF). It would later become known as RSS 0.9.</p>
					<p>Shortly after the introduction of RSS 0.9, Dave Winer of Userland Software contacted Libby regarding the RSS 0.9 format. Winer had developed an XML format to use with his site, ScriptingNews, and believed that it and RSS 0.9 could be combined and simplified to make a better, more usable, format. In July of 1999, Libby released a prototype of the new Rich Site Summary (also RSS), which became RSS 0.91. My Netscape then began using RSS 0.91 and continued to do so until 2001, when support for external RSS feeds was dropped. Netscape soon lost interest in RSS and left it without an owner. What would follow splintered the RSS format into two different versions.</p>
					<p>A mailing list of developers and other interested parties formed in order to continue the development of RSS. This group, called RSS-DEV (<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/</a>), produced a specification called RSS 1.0, in December 2000. RSS 1.0 was based on the original RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9) and sought to extend it by modularizing the original 0.9 version. These modules are namespaces that can be created by anyone, allowing new functionality to be added without changing the specification. It's important to note that RSS 1.0 is a descendant of RSS 0.9 but not related to RSS 0.91.</p>
					<p>At the same time, Winer declared himself the owner of RSS and continued to develop his own version, releasing what he deemed RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication). This new RSS format was based on RSS 0.91, the version that Winer and Libby developed together. The emphasis for RSS 2.0 was the simplicity of the format. When Winer ended up working at Harvard, he assigned ownership of RSS 2.0 to Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet &amp; Society, which now manages and publishes the specification at <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss">http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</a>. RSS 2.0 is the most widely used RSS format today. Today, the term RSS encompasses three different versions of the RSS format: RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0.</p><p class="top_link"><a href="#top">Top</a></p>
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		<li><h2><a name="arg_RSS">RSS</a></h2>
			<ol>  
			    <li><h3><a name="arg_what_are">What are RSS feeds?</a></h3>
					<p>Wikipedia defines RSS feeds as:</p> <blockquote cite="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss"><p> &quot;a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format.&quot;</p></blockquote>
					<p>We think RSS is more. RSS it'a a way of sharing information very quickly between different places on the world wide web with the minimum of bandwith waste. Our lives becomes faster from day to day and we want the information that surrounds us to be at least twice faster as us. What a few years ago could seem a revolution (websites with news!),  today is taken for granted: what we want today is the &quot;real time experience&quot;. Moreover, today communication is slowly switching to mobile and wireless: we have to admit that in most cases the available hardware technology does't allow the exchange of data to be as fast as the common wired line, so every bit saved is welcome. <br/>
					In this wierd and exiting situation RSS feeds take place. 
					</p><p class="top_link"><a href="#top">Top</a></p>
			    </li>
			    <li><h3><a name="arg_how_do">How do RSS feeds work?</a></h3>
					<p>We won't talk here about low level specification of RSS feeds, we will teach you how they generally work for common everyday user. We can figure an RSS file as a special file that contains constantly updated information about the site you are browsing. So, what would happen if you often check this file not from the same website but from another place on the web? You will always be up-to-dated about news of that website without visiting it, without loading all the background images, links, advertise... The idea behind it is &quot;you only load what you need&quot;.</p><p class="top_link"><a href="#top">Top</a></p>
			    </li>
			    <li><h3><a name="arg_where_to_find">Where can I find them?</a></h3>
					<p>RSS feed is a standardized format of sharing information, so all the websites that give constantly updated news should implement a service of syndacation. Have you ever noticed, while surfing the web, the symbol below or a link with a text similar to &quot;Subscribe RSS Feed&quot;?</p>
					<img src="../images/rss.png" title="RSS symbol" alt="RSS Symbol"/>
					<p>Well, that is a link to an RSS. Sometimes, even if that symbol is not present, websites have RSS subscripion available. Depending on what browser you are surfing with, you can find out a website with RSS by the presence of some kind of picture on your browser window. Let's view what that's all about.</p>
			    	<p class="top_link"><a href="#top">Top</a></p>
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